and that 23.9% of the population adhere to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which claim that Jews control their economy. Middle Ages In Medieval Italy, slavery was widespread, but was justified more often on religious rather than racial grounds. Over the course of the Early Medieval period, however, Steven Epstein states that people "from regions like the Balkans, Sardinia, and across the Alps" were brought over to the peninsula by Italian merchants, who thus "replenished the stock of slaves". Still, almost all the slaves in Genoa belonged to non-European races; the situation was different in Venice and Palermo, where emancipated slaves were considered free citizens in the 13th century. 19th and early 20th centuries Lombroso and scientific racism in Italy Even though there was already a wealth of Italian works engaging in racially motivated research on some groups, like those pertaining to the "Oriental" character of ethnic Sardinians living under Savoyard rule, or their supposedly malevolent and "degenerated" nature, scientific racism as a proper discipline began to impose itself at the national level only through the works of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso's theory of atavism compared the "white civilization" among the other races with the "primitive" or "savage" societies. Lombroso would publish his thesis in the wake of the Italian unification, thus providing an explanation for the unrest developing immediately thereafter in the recently annexed portion of the new country; the people inhabiting the formerly Bourbon Kingdom were in fact racially stereotyped, thereby fostering feelings of Northern Italian supremacy over the Southeners, while being paradoxically integrated in the nation's broad collective imaginary; As the Southeners were collectively constructed for the first time as an "anti-nation" within the new country, they were deemed "atavistic" alongside criminals and prostitutes. Lombroso's theories connecting physiognomy to criminal behavior explicitly blamed higher homicide rates in Calabria, Sicily, and once again the overseas Savoyard dominion of Sardinia, upon some residual influence of "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" blood amongst their populations. According to Lombroso, facial features like black hair, slight beard, bigger lips and longer nose were signs of such foreign "contamination" and directly correlated with a natural predisposition to delinquency. In 1871, Lombroso published "The White Man and the Man of Color", aimed at showing that the white man was superior in every respect to other races. Lombroso explicitly stated his belief in white supremacy: «It's a question of knowing if we whites, who haughtily tower over